Renato pressed his slightly numb temples as he walked out through the side door of the Nightwind Chapel.
After spending an entire day in the library, staring at densely packed Elvish text for hours on end, he had almost stopped recognizing the characters.
The Nightwind Family's collection was certainly extensive. More than ten thousand books on history, religion, military affairs, medicine, and other subjects lined the vast library beneath the chapel.
But to Renato, a human, these books were almost unreadable.
The elaborate Elvish rhetoric and passages as abstract as poetry made reading an ordeal for a nonnative reader like him.
Sometimes he had to read a sentence five or six times just to grasp its general meaning. His reading efficiency was abysmal.
After all, mastering a language for everyday conversation was one thing. Using it to read and understand the dark elves' long-winded narrative culture was another matter entirely.
The elves also liked to abbreviate characters in their books, which sometimes sent Renato looking through a dictionary, thinking he had encountered an unfamiliar word.
But having resolved to study, Renato would not give up easily. He began carefully selecting his reading material, focusing first on subjects that were straightforward and genuinely useful to him.
Lolth's scriptures were out. Every page was filled with mindless, fanciful praise of the Goddess, along with historical accounts so exaggerated that even Renato, a human, found them absurd.
Anyone who knew no better would have thought Lolth was the chief deity of the elves. Apparently, they felt no shame in spouting such nonsense with a straight face.
In the end, among a great pile of books on anatomy and toxicology, Renato selected two introductory language texts, one on Abyssal and the other on Infernal.
The benefits of learning a new language were readily apparent.